By Matt Garrepy
Connecting with fellow speakers and colleagues in Montréal during CMS Connect 26
Maybe there was a fly in the AI, but the first day of the Boye & Company CMS Connect 2026 conference was anything but buggy.
I had the honor of kicking off the third annual edition of our summer event in the ever-charming foothills of Montréal, where I shared some of the patterns surfacing in my coverage on CMS Critic.
Jeff Goldblum’s classic sci-fi film “The Fly” served as my thematic backdrop, reflecting the unforeseen consequences as agentic AI mutates everything. But that was just the beginning, and this assemblage of digital explorers was treated to some powerful presentations throughout the day:
Carrie Hane of Tanzen Consulting, one of the leading voices in content strategy, made a clear case for AI “cutting through the kudzu.” The answer isn’t more content, but fixing what we have and focusing on better outcomes.
Andrei Kalamkarov of Concordia University talked about his CMS becoming a teenager, and how AI has made the parenting job harder, not easier. As he observed, we need to own the work, even when AI produces it.
Alka Tandan of reframe & refine engaged the audience with her exploration of what happens when a CMS publishes, but no one clicks “Publish.” Where do humans become conditional – and where do we place our trust?
Deep in the discussion — one of the roundtables digging into the day's big questions.
Seb Barre of Shopify doubled down on the vital role of memory for achieving AI success, and how the “re-teaching tax” is impacting performance. He also shared the key defaults for reinforcing an agentic infrastructure.
Dayana Kibilds of SimpsonScarborough took a detour from AI, sharing grounded guidance for improving our content. Her simple recommendations – from optimizing headings to reducing paragraph length – were timely.
Michael Thompson of Sesimi took us behind the scenes of his platform’s capabilities for maintaining brand compliance and governing assets and templates. As he said, AI is awesome – but it doesn’t have to do everything.
Evelyne Bessette of TELUS took us through her journey to deploy a new chatbot, and why incremental steps, QA, and auditing are key to the successful activation of conversational AI.
Chuck Gahun of Forrester capped the day with some deep insights on AI agents as consumers, the emergence of “B2A marketing,” and where the machine advantage exists. Powerful stuff.
Dayana Kibilds on why content should make meaning, not just be decoded
Chuck Gahun closing the day: AI agents as consumers, and the rise of "B2A marketing."
We also had some rousing roundtable discussions on critical topics like AEO with Matthew McQueeny, Agentic content workflows with Chris Bryce, digital governance with Joyce Peralta, and evolving agency models with Robert Jacobi.
Our “CMS Idol” was once again a highlight of the conference, with vendors like Agility CMS, ai12z, Kajoo.ai, Sesimi, and TYPO3 showcasing their best 6-minute demos (it was a tight finish, but Sesimi took home the gold).
Huge props to my esteemed content colleagues, Janus Boye and Peter Dahlstrøm Andersen, for making this another memorable opportunity to connect. From our morning runs to wandering for bagels along sleepy streets, we always go beyond the tech.
If you’re interested in joining a future group meetting, get in touch.